Open Access and the Skewness of Science: It Can't Be Cream All the Way Down

Young NS, Ioannidis JPA, Al-Ubaydli O (2008) Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science. PLoS Medicine Vol. 5, No. 10, e201 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201

ARTICLE SUMMARY: "The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner's curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists' repeated samplings of the real world. The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). This system would be expected intrinsically to lead to the misallocation of resources. The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality. Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society's expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated."

There are reasons to be skeptical about the conclusions of this PLoS Medicine article. It says that science is compromised by insufficient "high impact" journals to publish in. The truth is that just about everything gets published somewhere among the planet's 25,000 peer reviewed journals, just not all in the top journals, which are, by definition, reserved for the top articles -- and not all articles can be top articles. The triage (peer review) is not perfect, so sometimes an article will appear lower (or higher) in the journal quality hierarchy than it ought to. But now that funders and universities are mandating Open Access, all research, top, middle and low will be accessible to everyone. This will correct any access inequities and it will also help remedy quality misassignment (inasmuch as lower quality journals may have fewer subscribers, and users may be less likely to consult lower quality journals). But it will not change the fact that 80% of citations (and presumably usage) goes to the top 20% of articles, though it may flatten this "skewness of science" (Seglen 1992) somewhat.

Seglen PO (1992) The skewness of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43:628-38

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum